Every
year, Bill Bigelow, an Oregon high school teacher, plays out the same scene for
his students. He seizes a student's purse and announces that the purse is his.
He holds it. Is possession enough? He takes out the lipstick and announces that
it is his. He now knows the purse’s contents; is that enough? His arguments
ring hollow, particularly when the students saw his crime in the making. They
do not yet know that the student whose purse was seized was the teacher's confederate.
When all his arguments have failed to convince, he then asks, "What if I
discovered it?" The students chuckle a little, but reject that argument
as well. Then Bigelow asks, "So why do we say that Columbus 'discovered'
America?" In that spirit, this essay will investigate the feat of Christopher
Columbus, the original American hero.

I
worked in Columbus, Ohio for five years, and in 1992 during the 500th
anniversary of the New World's discovery. The town mounted a celebration that
lasted the entire year. In Columbus they have a replica of the Santa Maria, the
ship Christopher Columbus sailed on during his epic voyage. The replica is a
tourist attraction. There were even plans to erect a statue of Columbus, hundreds
of feet tall. He is the original Founding Father.

Most
Americans are aware of recent significant revision of Columbus' feat. The celebration
of 1992 was starkly different from 1892, the Chicago Columbian Exposition (actually
staged in 1893). The 1893 Exposition was a huge event that attracted 24 million
visitors, for the largest event attendance in world history to that time. In
1992, however, there were protests and events such as Indigenous People’s Days,
instead of Columbus Day celebrations. The year 1992 marked the release of a number
of “revisionist” works. It coincided with research I was already doing into the
news and history.

I originally became
aware of blemishes to Columbus' image after reading Howard Zinn’s revolutionary A People's History of
the United States. As a good scholar does, Zinn began his “revisionist” look
at Columbus by studying the primary evidence, namely Columbus' log, prepared during
his voyage of discovery. As with so much of history, we know little for sure.

For instance, Zinn did not really read the
captain’s log. He read a translation of a partial copy of the log that Bartolomé
Las Casas made nearly 500 years ago. The original log was lost centuries ago.
Over the centuries there have been many portraits drawn of Columbus, and they
all look different because nobody really knows what Columbus looked like. He
may have had no portrait made while alive. Columbus' birthplace and year of birth
have been enduring controversies. The standard view is that Columbus was born
in Genoa, part of today’s Italy, in around 1451, give or take a year, but there
are arguments that Columbus was Spanish, Portuguese, Jewish and several other
European nationalities. Debate has raged for centuries over where Columbus first
landed in the New World. His very name means "Christ-bearing
colonizer," so was possibly not this birth name, an incredible coincidence,
a creative translation or a sign of "God's hand."[1]

The
best “revisionist” histories attempt a determination of what may have really happened.
In Zinn's "revisionism," he read the captain's log and reported what
Columbus was after: gold.

On
Friday, October 12, 1492 the ships sighted land and the New World was discovered,
although the men aboard did not know it yet. There was a reward of 10,000 maravedis
($540, a large sum in those days, more than a year’s wages for a typical sailor)
from the Spanish Crown to the man who first sighted land. Columbus claimed the
reward because the night land was sighted he thought he earlier saw a light in
the West.[2] It was
flimsy evidence, but Columbus stole the reward from the sailor who first sighted
land.

According to his log, Columbus
thought he had reached Asia and was near Japan and the Chinese Empire. At dawn,
Columbus and his armed Spaniards went ashore, unfurled their flags, planted a
cross, and claimed the land in the name of the king and queen of Spain. That
ceremony attended the Spanish wherever they went.

Immediately
after Columbus finished making his announcement (to the empty air) of taking possession,
the natives began showing up on the beach. They were all naked and friendly,
and Columbus described those new Spanish subjects at some length. Some natives
carried short wooden spears, but were so unacquainted with weaponry that when
Columbus showed a native his sword, the man grabbed the sword by the blade and
cut himself.

On that epic day of first contact, three dynamics were evident that
would figure largely in future events. They obviously had no common language
or culture, and Columbus badly misunderstood much of what the natives tried telling
him using gestures. Second was Columbus’ judgment of how easily the natives could
be turned into Christians. Third was the event Columbus finished that day’s log
with. Columbus inferred from native gestures that natives from other islands
enslaved them. He thought those natives would make fine servants himself, so
he captured six of them that first day.

On
the second day of discovery, Columbus made first mention of the subject that dominated
his logs thereafter: gold. He noticed that some natives had gold jewelry in their
noses, so he made the first inquiry, an inquiry that presaged the Spanish
obsession for the next century: “Where’s the gold?”

The
standard sequence of events was going ashore to new land, claiming it for Spain,
planting a cross and asking where the gold was. Columbus’ voyage of discovery
was really a gold hunt. In Columbus’ log of December 26, 1492, he made his journey’s
purpose clear: to find enough gold to finance another Crusade
to conquer Jerusalem.

While reading
Columbus’ log, I was struck by how many times Columbus ordered his men to not
steal from the natives. Columbus made sure the Spaniards would be on their best
behavior for those initial encounters. The natives freely gave all they had,
or would trade objects of immense value for baubles. Columbus continually expressed
his amazement that the natives gave all manner of goods to the Spaniards for trinkets,
or simply gave it away. As the boats sailed from island to island, the most common
native reaction was fleeing when the Spaniards showed up (some apparently thought
the ships were sea monsters, while others timidly fled from the strange men and
boats). The other reaction was warmly welcoming the Spaniards. Columbus and
his men never received a hostile reception.

In
his log, Columbus regularly remarked on the astounding beauty of the islands and
the natives’ friendly, happy, peaceful nature, but the obsession of his writings
was always where the gold was and how the islands’ wealth could be exploited.
A mere three days into his gold quest, on October 14th, Columbus made
clear what he thought of the natives' military might. His log informed his king
and queen that, “with fifty men you could subject every one and make them do what
you wished.”

On October 15th the
ships anchored at an island where the natives “let us go anywhere we desired and
gave us anything we asked.” After staying a couple hours and determining there
was no gold, they prepared to leave. One of the captives then escaped by jumping
overboard, as another had done the night before. Columbus’ men tried capturing
the natives, but their boat was too quick. Columbus indicated to the local natives
that his captives were with him because they had harmed him, but that ruse was
probably unconvincing.

After sailing
through the islands, visiting and trading with natives who had not fled, the ships
came to another island on November 11. There a canoe with six “youths” in it
approached the ship, and five came aboard. Columbus captured them. Then he sent
his men ashore, where they captured seven women and three children. Columbus
was modifying a standard Portuguese practice
used in Africa, one he said he used many times when he was a slave runner: capturing
the natives, taking them back to Europe, teaching them his language, and bringing
them back as interpreters. It had not worked well with Africans, because the
natives were not happy with their treatment, but Columbus thought that if he abducted
entire families, he might have better luck. That evening, with his slave stock
replenished, Columbus was delighted when a man came to the ship and asked to come
aboard, as among the new captives were his wife and three children. Columbus
gladly allowed the man to become enslaved with his family.

On
November 21, gold fever may have overcome the Pinta’s captain, as he sailed away
in search of gold. Columbus was outraged, but had no option but to continue with
his two remaining ships.

After sailing
along the coast of Cuba, asking about gold and riches, Columbus reached the island
that he named La Isla Española, on December 6, 1492. Haiti and the Dominican Republic are on that island
today. It was the first place permanently colonized by Europeans in the Western
Hemisphere.

As usual, the natives fled
when they saw the ships. Columbus and his men had to work hard at convincing
the natives of their friendly intentions, especially when they had captured natives
aboard. As they sailed along the coast, their reception was either friendly or
the natives fled. Columbus began to understand the political order, and discovered
men called caciques were leaders of some sort. It was a hereditary office, with
minor similarity to European royalty.

By
“discovering” the Caribbean’s inhabitants, Columbus had stumbled into a civilization
about 1500 years old. Española was the center of that island civilization, and
a people known today as the Taino dominated it. They had migrated from South America, along the archipelago
of Caribbean islands at about the time Jesus lived, gradually absorbing/displacing
a hunter-gatherer culture. The Taino were Arawakan people. There were other
ethnic groups in the Caribbean, such as the Caribs, Guanahatabey and Ciguayo,
although the Taino were by far the largest group and occupied the greatest portion
of Caribbean land. The Taino’s material and spiritual culture was what all other
Caribbean groups based their culture on. The Taino were settled in agricultural
communities and possessed a rich and diverse food supply. Life was easy in the
pre-Columbian Caribbean, and if there could be any generalizations made of the
Taino, particularly as compared to today, it would be their happiness and gentleness.
Their world was about as close to earthly paradise as human existence has ever
come, a fact that was not lost on Columbus, as he often remarked upon it in his
log. He regularly observed that the natives did not seem capable
of dishonesty.

On December 25, 1492,
with Columbus aboard, the Santa Maria ran aground at night while a boy was steering.
The local village came to the rescue and unloaded the sinking ship. Columbus
was amazed at the natives’ helpfulness, and assured his king and queen that “not
even a shoe string [more literally "lace point," used to secure shoes
and clothes - Ed.] was lost!” The cacique of the helpful local village, Guacanagarí,
welcomed the stranded sailors.

Because
their largest ship was destroyed, Columbus left behind about 40 Spaniards and
they built a fort from the ship’s timbers. Many of Columbus’ men begged to stay
instead of sailing back to Spain. Columbus admitted that no fort was necessary
among such friendly and peaceful people, but he could not put aside his European
conditioning. Columbus wanted to condition the natives to obey their new Spanish
overlords (although they did not know they had overlords yet) out of “love and
fear.”[3] So Columbus had a lombard and musket
fired in a demonstration of power, frightening those happy, helpful natives.

The Pinta eventually rejoined the Niña, its
captain’s gold quest profitably concluded. The captain claimed he was innocently
separated from the other ships, which may have been true. Columbus felt the explanation
was a lie, but could do nothing about it, so he did not punish the Pinta’s captain.[4]On January 16, 1493, the ships
were sailing back across the Atlantic, soon after they had murdered two natives
while trading on January 13th.[5] Columbus described
those murdered natives and their people as “evil, and I believe they are from
the island of Caribe, and that they eat men.”[6] That characterized the attitude
that prevailed during the second voyage and beyond. If the natives were friendly
and welcoming, they were the gentle Taino.[7]
If they were less than welcoming or were unfortunate enough to be murdered by
the Spaniards, they were cannibalistic savages, deserving whatever fate the Spaniards
could dish out.

On
that first epic voyage, Columbus began the unfounded myth that the Caribbean natives
practiced cannibalism. About the only evidence there ever was for Caribbean cannibalism
came from Columbus’ imagination while he interpreted native gestures. His misunderstandings
correlated with European mythology. Columbus wrote of savage cannibals, people
with an eye in the middle of their forehead (log entries of November 4th
and 23rd, 1492), and dog-like noses that drink the blood of their victims
after cutting their throats and castrating them (log entry of November 4th,
1492). Columbus found in native gestures what he expected to find. For all the
writing of what a Renaissance man Columbus was, he had many medieval fantasies.
Late in his life he labored on an apocalyptic work that was eventually titled
the Book of Prophecies, which Kirkpatrick Sale says has been “an acute
embarrassment to most Columbus hagiographers, since it is so at odds with the
scientific Renaissance rationalist they like to depict as the forerunner of European
conquest…”[8]

When
Columbus arrived back in Spain, his sponsors were pleased to hear of new lands
to exploit. Let there be no misunderstanding their intentions - they were not
benevolent. It is true that Queen Isabella did not want to enslave the natives.
She wanted loyal subjects. Yet, the sovereigns frowned on slavery only after
it became evident that the natives made poor and unprofitable slaves, because
they quickly died when shipped to Europe. In addition, in Europe the difference
between slave and subject was sometimes little more than a semantics exercise.

It is true that “converting” them to Christianity
was a goal. Conversion is a dubious goal for any religion, and the reign of Ferdinand
and Isabella was notable for initiating the Spanish
Inquisition, which was mainly an attack against Jews who had lived fairly
peacefully and prosperously for centuries under Moorish
rule. Jews converted to Christianity in order to continue to live in Spain,
at least those who survived the mass murders that dotted Spain over the previous
hundred years.

In January of 1492, Grenada,
the last city held by the Moors on the Iberian Peninsula, fell to the Spanish
armies, ending several centuries of warfare. The Islamic and Jewish people who
had lived there for centuries were given the option of converting to Christianity
or being expelled from the country. The Jews had been kicked out of European countries for centuries, and Spain
had been a safe place for them, but no longer. The Inquisition especially targeted
conversos, who were Jews forced to convert to Christianity. The suspected
crime of conversos was continuing to practice their Jewish faith in secret.
For that crime they could be burned at the stake, and thousands were.

What
happened to the Canary Islanders off Africa's coast was a preview of the Caribbean
Islanders' fate. The Guanches, who came across the ocean long before Jesus was
born, had settled the Canary Islands. It is believed they came from North Africa,
perhaps from Berber stock. They built step pyramids and made mummies as the Egyptians
did. Many Guanches were tall and blond. Castile and Portugal were involved in
conquering the Canaries. Pope Clement VI “awarded” the islands to Castile in
1344. They were first invaded in 1402, but the final Spanish conquest that destroyed
the Guanches was mounted during the 1490s, directed by Queen Isabella, who began
her campaign in 1477.[9] The rationale was
the same one used for Spain's Reconquest: the people they were conquering were
not Christians. The invasion was to “save their souls.” That was an audacious
rationale for thievery and murder. The process of saving them destroyed them.

In 1494, the Spaniards invaded the Canaries'
largest island, Tenerife, for the first time. The Spaniards were defeated decisively
by the Guanches, but mounted another campaign in 1496, and that time were successful,
aided by an epidemic disease (obviously introduced by the invaders) that swept
through the Guanches, killing large numbers of them. The Guanches were enslaved,
the islands deforested, and the settlers flocked there.
In 1504, The Inquisition came to the Canaries to enforce the new faith and hunt
Guanches still practicing their pagan faith in secret, and any Jewish settlers
who thought they could escape the long arm of Spain. As a culture, the Guanches
were largely extinct by 1600, but genetically their remnants were absorbed into
the colonial settler populations, which can still be seen in Canary Islanders
today.

Returning to
the Spanish court with the six Indian captives who survived the return voyage
(most of his captives had already died, and only two would survive a whole year),
along with gold nuggets, parrots and other New World paraphernalia, was Columbus’
finest hour. He was named Admiral of the Ocean Sea, cut in on 10% of the New
World’s loot, and a second voyage was immediately planned. Before he met with
Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus drafted a memorial regarding future colonization
plans. Nearly two-thirds of the document was concerned with how to handle the
gold.[10] Inserted
between paragraphs about securing the gold was a paragraph about building a church
and converting the Indians. The sovereigns agreed with the document in principle
and the second voyage was planned. The Spanish names of the sovereigns were Fernando
and Isabel, and Columbus’ Spanish name was Cristóbal Colón, but this essay uses
their anglicized names.

The
second voyage was not the three-ship excursion into the unknown of the previous
year. A full-scale invasion was planned, with seventeen ships and far more than
one thousand men, including well-armed soldiers, a troop of cavalry lancers, six
priests to convert the heathens, man-eating dogs (those infamous dogs of war)
and not one woman. It was no friendly expedition, going to dance and sing with
the natives, asking politely if they had gold. It appears that the second expedition
was partly financed by wealth seized from the Jews, as on May 23rd,
1493, the day the second voyage was authorized, the sovereigns issued royal orders
stepping up Jewish wealth confiscation.[11]
Not many, if any, of those gentle New World islanders had any idea what the future
held, but history was about to be made.

There
is no surviving admiral’s log, but others of the invading force chronicled that
voyage’s events. An Italian nobleman, Michele de Cuneo, one of the two hundred
“adventurers” on the voyage, wrote a letter in 1495. A Spaniard, Guillermo Coma,
wrote a few letters to the folks back home. The fleet surgeon, Dr. Diego Alvarez
Chanca, also wrote a letter, and those three accounts are the main surviving primary
records of the second voyage. Columbus’ son Ferdinand wrote a second-hand account
of Columbus’ second voyage, writing from Columbus’ admiral’s log, which has since
been lost.[12]

The
invasion force was prepared for the “inhuman savagery” of the natives. On the
first day land was sighted, November 3, 1493, Coma had this to say, before he
had even seen a native (besides those already in Spanish captivity):

“These islands are inhabited by Cannabili,
a wild, unconquered race which feeds on human flesh. I would be right to call
them anthropophagi. They wage unceasing wars against gentle and timid Indians
to supply flesh; this is their booty and is what they hunt. They ravage, despoil,
and terrorize the Indians ruthlessly.”[13]

Descriptions
such as Coma’s, typical of the European perspective, said far more about Europeans
than the natives. The Spaniards, led by Columbus, had already dehumanized people
they had not yet seen. They were engaging in a time-honored practice of dehumanizing
those they were about to prey upon.

No
convincing evidence exists that the natives of the Caribbean were particularly
warlike, fierce, or cannibals, even the legendary Caribs, although they raided
the Taino islands, generally to take “brides.” In one of many ironies of the
New World’s “discovery,” the second voyage first made landfall at Guadeloupe (after
a brief stop for Columbus to “claim” Martinique). Guadeloupe is considered the
island furthest north that the Caribs inhabited. It was Columbus’ best and nearly
only chance to meet a real Carib on that voyage, and it is doubtful that he ever
met a Carib in the flesh, except some possibly Carib women and children that he
captured during a later voyage, in his standard exploration style.[14] The fleet stayed at Guadeloupe
for a week. What kind of encounter did the Spaniards have with those fierce cannibals?
The natives all fled inland when the Spaniards showed up, and the Spaniards failed
to meet any.[15] On Guadeloupe, Columbus’ men
invaded the island, one party getting itself lost for days, while others seized
the women they found, possibly Carib women, but also possibly “bride captured”
Taino.

On November 14, two weeks before
the fleet arrived at the fort manned by the forty Spaniards left behind on the
first voyage, Columbus, Cuneo, Coma and Chanca recorded a native encounter on
St. Croix. The seventeen ships were anchored off the island, and longboats had
gone ashore to capture slaves. Just then a canoe appeared, paddling along the
shoreline. The canoe held four men, two women and a child. The sight of the
large ships left the canoe's passengers spellbound. The canoe just sat there
for an hour, the natives mutely staring at the ships.

To
the Spaniards, those awestruck natives were merely more slaves to capture. They
sent boats after the canoe, sneaking up on it. The surprise attack worked, and
the natives did not see the boat until escaping the two-dozen armed men was impossible.
Then the men and women shot arrows at their attackers. One European was wounded
and later died. The natives were captured and brought aboard. One man was severely
wounded, his intestines hanging from his wound. The Spaniards knew he would not
live, so they threw him overboard. The Spaniards then watched the native hold
his intestines with one hand and swim to shore. Their captive Tainos apparently
said they should not let the man escape to tell his people what happened, as they
might retaliate. So the Spaniards caught him on shore and brought him back, where
they tied him up and threw him overboard again. When he amazingly began swimming
to shore again, they shot him several times until he died as he struggled for
shore.

Those natives were the first
ones the Spaniards met who tried defending themselves. Accordingly, the invaders
called those unfortunate natives “Caribs.” They were not Caribs, but it was in
keeping with the good native/bad native tradition Columbus had already begun on
his first voyage. Whether they were Caribs or not, their treatment ended up the
same.

Cuneo (probably
Columbus’ close friend, maybe from childhood) wrote the first recorded account
of sexual relations between Europeans and natives. Cuneo received a “gift” from
Columbus. The gift was one of the captured native women. In the words of Cuneo:

“While I was in the boat I captured
a very beautiful Carib woman the said Lord Admiral gave to me, and with whom,
having taken her into my cabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceived
desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did
not want it and treated me with her fingernails in such a manner that I wished
I had never begun. But seeing that (to tell you the end of it all), I took a
rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams that
you would not have believed your ears. Finally we came to an agreement in such
manner that I can tell you that she seemed to have been brought up in a school
of harlots.”[16]

The fleet left a swath of terror wherever
it went, and had not yet arrived at its destination: the fort at La Villa de la
Navidad. On November 28th they arrived, looking for those forty men
left behind near Guacanagarí’s friendly village. The reception was different
from what they had envisioned.

When
Columbus sailed back to Spain, he gave the men at the fort several admonitions.
They amounted to behaving themselves around their native hosts and finding the
gold. The men at the fort, being creatures of their age, acted normally for fifteenth
century Spaniards around naked women and gold. According to Guacanagarí, they
fought with each other the moment Columbus’ ship was out of sight. Some seized
about five women each as their concubines while others marauded across the island
in search of villages with gold. Their infighting climaxed when two Spaniards
killed another one, then eleven of them marched across the island to where they
thought the gold mines were. Some had already left the fort for good, striking
out on their own in that land of naked women and gold. Some had already died
of illness. God only knows what predatory excesses accompanied their trek across
the island, but their reception in the “mining region” was likely not welcoming,
as they encountered Caonabó, the cacique that reigned there. Caonabó was not
a Taino, but from the less gentle Macorix ethnic group. He did not suffer the
predatory Spaniards long. He had them killed, then marched to Columbus’ fort.
The remaining Spaniards had taken up residence in Guacanagarí’s village with their
concubines. Caonabó had the village burned in a night attack. Only eleven Spaniards
remained, and eight of those died by drowning as they tried escaping. Guacanagarí
tried protecting the Spaniards as his village burned, and was wounded.[17]

Columbus
could not have been too surprised; he had already been handing out captured women
as sex gifts to his men. The only ally the Spaniards had was Guacanagarí, and
the head priest on the expedition, Friar Buil, wanted Guacanagarí executed as
an example. Columbus was not about to execute his only ally, church advice or
not. Instead he had the fort site dug up, to see if the men buried any gold they
might have seized (as Columbus instructed them to), and they moved off to establish
another settlement.

On the first voyage,
the natives who did not flee were exceedingly friendly, and at times seemed to
worship the Spaniards as heavenly beings visiting earth. The Spaniards’ reputation
preceded them then, and most local natives fled before them. The fort had been
built near a shipwreck, so was not a great harbor. The fleet sailed seventy-five
miles away to establish a beachhead, closer to potential gold mines in the island’s
mountains. Columbus picked the new site, yet the harbor was poor and there was
no fresh water nearby, among other problems. That is where Columbus’ ambition
became focused, and the town of Isabela (in honor of his queen) was built there.
He even gave his house (one of the few stone structures built there) the ostentatious
name of “the royal palace” in case the sovereigns should stay there when surveying
their empire.

The town of Isabela lasted
two miserable years before it was abandoned in favor of the site at Santo Domingo.
Isabela was plagued with disasters, including greed, famine, disease and violence.
Pigs picked up in the Canary Islands may have carried swine flu, making a third
of the Spaniards deathly ill, and killing the natives in droves. The dead natives
lay in great stinking piles, in the words of the Spanish historian Oviedo, so
many that “they could not be counted.”[18] European-introduced
disease killed tens of millions of natives during the sixteenth century.

The Spaniards would always
wear out any welcome the New World natives might give them. The first-contact
accounts of Spaniards and other Europeans throughout the New World unfailingly
recorded the friendly welcome they received. When a “first-contact” account recorded
a hostile native reception, historians use that as evidence that white men had
previously visited, such as Ponce de León’s reception
as he invaded Florida, or Coronado’s as he
invaded pueblo land.[19] Spanish cruelty was readily evident
throughout the surviving accounts. In August 1493, as Columbus explored the Españolan
coastline, they discovered an uninhabited island populated with seals and birds.
The Spaniards killed eight seals and numerous birds, apparently for no other reason
than they could, as those creatures had not yet learned to fear humans.[20] On his last voyage, one of Columbus’ men shot
a spider monkey out of a tree with a crossbow; then cut off one of its arms.
While the monkey was dying, impaled on the arrow with one arm missing, Columbus
noted how the sight of the dying monkey frightened one of his dogs and even a
native peccary on board. Columbus then performed an experiment: he threw the
monkey and peccary together to watch the reaction. The monkey grappled and subdued
the pig with its tail and remaining arm, and Columbus concluded that the monkey
hunted pigs, what was not true. Columbus reported that event and finding to the
Spanish sovereigns. Hans Koning wrote that such petty cruelty paled beside the
human toll that Columbus’ reign and legacy would inflict on the natives, but for
Columbus to write of the incident in an offhand, even scientific, way was sad.[21]

Admiral
Columbus may have been a good or even great sailor. That issue is controversial,
however. He lost a number of ships due to poor judgment, and there are other
problems with his reputation as a great seaman. Kirkpatrick Sale takes Columbus'
image as a "great seaman" to task numerous times in The Conquest
of Paradise. Whatever his merits may have been as a mariner, Columbus was
a grossly incompetent colonial administrator. Columbus was about forty-three
years old, a white-haired sailor for those times, especially to be sailing into
adventurous waters.

Trying to transplant
European civilization to new lands is not easy, and Columbus did not exactly bring
with him the best people to do it. They all, probably even the priests, had visions
of gold dancing in their heads. When it came time to build dwellings and other
structures, the freebooters who were not sick were not eager laborers. The ground
was not paved with gold, either. Many of those disappointed freebooters-turned-construction-workers
“mutinied” in early 1494, led by the royal accountant (whose job was counting
the crown’s loot), and tried seizing ships to sail back to Castile. They were
imprisoned and sent back on the next boat to Spain. Columbus disfigured those
who had stashed away gold by slicing their noses and ears, to little effect.
The thievery was rampant.

Columbus was
ill for a few months in late 1493. When he recovered, he sailed to Cuba in search
of the Asian mainland, leaving one of his brothers behind as governor. Nepotism
was a prominent feature of Columbus’ reign. Columbus sailed to Cuba and Jamaica
- killing natives, enjoying a hearty welcome, or both - and he always searched
for gold.

Columbus was so intent on
saying that he found Asia that he engaged in a bizarre act in Cuba. In June 1494,
after sailing along the Cuban coast for a month, he compelled his crew to swear
that Cuba was not an island but was in fact, “the mainland of the commencement
of the Indies.” He made his crew swear out a notarized statement to that effect,
and told them they were subject to a “penalty of 10,000 maravedis and the cutting
out of the tongue that each one hereafter should say contrary.” He also threatened
whippings.[22] Columbus’ hagiographers again
have a difficult time explaining such behavior, which was possibly to fulfill
royal objectives to search for Asia. If Columbus could dot that “I” he could
go back to Española and keep looking for gold.[23]

Columbus’ behavior accords well with a devout
Catholic of the day. A little more than a century later, the Inquisition would
silence Bruno and Galileo for saying the earth was not the center of
the universe (Bruno being burned alive). Galileo’s crime was demonstrating it
to anybody who dared look through a telescope. Columbus tried to create reality
by decree.

Columbus became ill again
in September 1494 and was bedridden for several months. His men ran wild. More
than a thousand men swarmed across the island, looking for gold, sex and food.
They had been ransacking the island before then, but when Columbus was sick it
was a free for all. They raped, murdered and pillaged without mercy. Not everybody
on the expedition was a fiend. Some were probably shocked by their comrades’
depravity, but their shock did little to abate the atrocities. Friar Buil became
disillusioned with the New World affair and went home. Because the battles on
the Iberian Peninsula had ended (the Moors had been defeated), many unemployed
soldiers and adventurers signed up for the expedition. It did not turn out as
they had hoped, and many died of starvation and disease, alone in an alien world.

When
the Spanish eventually invaded Mexico and the Florida region, it was evident that
those more urbanized native cultures were more familiar with warfare than the
naked Caribbean people. The mainlanders put up a better fight, but they too were
no match for Spanish steel and bloodthirstiness. Events in the Caribbean were
not really a collision of two cultures, as has been written. One devoured the
other.

By
the time Columbus had recovered enough to take control of his men, perhaps 50,000
natives had died, and possibly far more. By that time, the natives were trying
to fight back, but were largely ineffectual against armed and armored men with
a lust for gold and murder. In March 1495, Columbus regained control of his men
and mounted an armed expedition that marched across the island. Hundreds of armed
men slaughtered thousands more natives in battle, if “battle” can be used to describe
the spectacle of naked people against Spanish swords, firearms, and man-eating
dogs. It was a “pacification” campaign.

The
purpose of the pacification campaign was to begin turning the native population
into submissive and pliant slaves. Columbus sold the western voyages on the premise
that the return on investment would be great. Although converting the heathen
masses to Christianity was given lip service, nobody should take that notion seriously,
and in fact no conversions took place. As with nearly every other exploration
in world history, the bottom line of the expedition was the bottom line: how profitable
would such an undertaking be? Columbus’ extravagant claims of mountains of gold
had yet to bear fruit. In February of 1494, Columbus hurriedly sent back to Spain
the expedition’s first dividends: slaves and gold. All gold taken from the natives
was shipped back to the monarchy, to keep their interest up. Twenty-six natives
survived the trip back to the Spain.

The
cleverness of the Spaniards (and a sense of humor?) shines through from time to
time. One anecdote which was funny, in a sick way, was how Columbus’ men captured
an uncooperative cacique, Caonabó, who Columbus said was the “principal king of
the island.” Caonabó initiated the killing of those rapacious men at the fort.
The Spaniards had a pair of handcuffs and leg irons polished so they shined.
One of Columbus’ men went to Caonabó with the “gifts.” Caonabó was told that
the handcuffs and leg irons were jewelry of great status. He was told that the
King of Spain wore them. Caonabó put them on and was shackled in short order.
The Spaniards must have laughed about that one for days. After being put on display
at Columbus’ “royal palace,” he was shipped to Spain with his fancy jewelry.
He died en route, as usual for a native.[24]

In
February 1495, Columbus shipped 550 of those “gentle Tainos” to Spain for the
slave markets. Only 350 survived the voyage, and on arrival half of those were
dying. In 1495, Columbus instituted policies that would prove more effective
at exterminating the population than pure violence had so far, and would pay handsome
dividends to the Crown.

Columbus designed
a tribute system. Spaniards would not deign to dig any gold for themselves, so
the natives had to. Every Taino over 14 years of age was to give a hawk’s bell
(about the size of a thimble) of gold to the rulers (Columbus and his men) every
three months. Upon receipt of the gold, the natives were given tokens to wear
around their necks as proof of payment. It was a simple system. When the Spaniards
found Tainos without the appropriate tokens, they chopped their hands off, leaving
them to bleed to death and making examples of them. It is estimated that about
ten thousand Taino died handless that way.

The
quota was impossible to meet. The natives had to stop growing food and taking
care of themselves to try mining gold. They began starving, falling prey to European
disease and all manner of horror, even if the Spanish did not murder them for
“sport.” The natives fled as far as they could go: across the island, up into
the hills, even to other islands. There was no permanent escape, except by death.
Mothers began killing their children before they took their own lives. The Tainos
had mass suicides by jumping from cliffs and poisoning themselves, yet the Spanish
killed far more, and in ingenious ways. Guacanagarí, Europe’s first ally in the
New World, was eventually driven into the mountains himself by the Spanish depredations,
dying alone, wandering the mountains of his ruined world.

What happened on
La Isla Española in significant ways has no precedent in world history. Until
the gold strike in the island’s mountains in 1499, which made Columbus a rich
man and was the first vindication of the whole Indies business, there was no gold
found in significant quantities. Instead of chopping off endless hands, a new
variant of a Castilian traditional system was imposed in response to a revolt
by Columbus’ men, who wanted land and slaves for themselves. It quickly evolved
into the “encomienda” system. It was slavery in everything but the name. The
natives were given to Spanish “care” and taught good Christian principles while
they were being worked to death, if they were not beheaded on a whim.

For all
of Columbus’ rhetoric, conversion apparently was never implemented on Española,
except when they began enslaving the natives in the “encomienda” program. That
is a rich irony, as Columbus immediately began calling himself the “Christ-bearer,”
although his efforts did not convert any natives.[25]
“Death-bearer” would have been more apt. The gold strike of 1499 was when Columbus
finally hit pay dirt. While the natives lasted, there was finally a genuine gold
rush on Española, the first of many in the New World.

Columbus’
passion for gold was more than mere greed. He invested it with supernatural,
divine, qualities. A few years before he died he wrote,

“Gold is the most precious
of all commodities; gold constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all
he needs in the world, as also the means of rescuing souls from purgatory, and
restoring them to the enjoyment of paradise.”[26]

Columbus thought that gold
was the ticket to heaven. Apparently, he never heard the words: “You can't take
it with you.”

Columbus
eventually fell out of favor with the Crown, and Francisco de Bobadilla and Nicolás
de Ovando succeeded Columbus as the governor of Española in 1500 and 1501. The
devastation of Española continued unabated, and Ovando was even more ruthless
than Columbus. The mines were being worked furiously, and natives were dying
at an incredible rate. In 1503, the island's southeastern and southwestern regions
had not been completely conquered. Presiding over the southwestern region, known
as Xaraguá, was Anacaona, the highly respected widow of Caonabó, the cacique who
received the gift of those shiny manacles.

In
1503, Ovando went with 360 soldiers to Xaraguá for the stated purpose of improving
relations with the Taino. Anacaona graciously welcomed Ovando and his men, housing
and feeding them. All the region’s caciques were summoned to welcome the Spaniards.
The natives were either amazingly forgiving, or naïve. During that celebration,
at a sign from Ovando, his soldiers fell upon their unsuspecting hosts. They
slaughtered everybody in sadistic fashion - cutting children’s legs off, etc.
After enough people had been killed to satisfy the Spanish bloodlust, the soldiers
herded the remaining caciques into the royal hut and set it ablaze, burning them
to death. What Anacaona must have felt, after the deceitful capture of her husband
years before, can only be imagined. Ovando had some warped sense of honor. Instead
of disemboweling or burning Anacaona alive, they hanged her.[27]
Eighty-four caciques (nearly all the region’s leadership) died in the massacre,
and that region was swiftly conquered. The next year the southeastern region
of the island was “pacified” using standard Spanish brutality, and there was not
much resistance from the fast-dwindling native population, although in their twilight
years a native named Enrique eventually created a native stronghold in the mountains
that held out for years, and they easily defeated the Spanish attacks while demonstrating
vastly greater humanity than the Spaniards.

The
dogs the Spaniards brought were large, strong breeds such as mastiffs and greyhounds,
trained to kill. Dogs had been used in European warfare clear back to the ancient
Romans, Greeks and Persians, which is where the phrase “let loose the dogs of
war” came from. In Europe, the warfare was against armored opponents, and the
dogs often wore armor themselves. In the Caribbean, where the people were naked,
and in the New World in general where warfare was practically unknown in the European
sense (large battles of extermination), the dogs were murderously effective.
The invaders would let loose the dogs and they would easily kill and maim the
terrorized people.

Infants’ bodies
are soft, and were quite a tasty treat for the dogs, so the Spaniards regularly
fed infants to their dogs, alive, and at times while the horrorstricken parents
watched.[28] The
Spaniards had contests to see who could cut a living person in half with one stroke
of the sword. They would test the sharpness of their blades by beheading the
nearest handy native.[29]

During
the Western Hemisphere's rape during the next century,
natives often became nothing more than dog food. An Inca conquistador described
a dog food storage technique:

“…when
I came from Cartagena, I saw a Portuguese named Roque Martín, who had the quarters
of Indians hanging on a porch to feed his dogs with, as if they were wild beasts…”[30]

There were butcher shops throughout
the Caribbean region during the years of conquest, where Indian bodies were sold
as dog food.[31]One practice, used on the
Guanches as another prelude to New World events, was known as the montería
infernal, the infernal chase, or manhunt. Instead of hunting foxes, the conquistadors
would hunt natives with their dogs in a jaunty outing. The dogs feasted on their
hapless prey. The montería infernal became a favorite pastime of many
conquistadors, such as Hernando de Soto. Another event to pass the time
and provide entertainment was to pit a naked native, sometimes armed with a stick,
against a dog. It was reminiscent of the Roman Coliseum. The dogs killed their
human prey by disemboweling them, although jugular attack was also used, sometimes
leading to decapitation. The natives came to fear being thrown to the dogs more
than any other fate.[32]

For various reasons, the New World’s natives
had few domesticated animals. The llama
of South America was the New World's largest domesticated animal. Parrots, turkeys,
ducks, guinea pigs and a small dog the Aztecs raised for food were about the only
other domesticated animals in the New World. There were no domestic herds of
cattle, horses, goats, sheep or pigs for the Spaniards to slaughter. The natives
were largely vegetarian, especially those not living near the oceans. The Spaniards
took herds of European pigs with them as a cafeteria on the hoof, as Hernando
de Soto did in southeastern North America. Those were exceptions, not the rule.
When the Spaniards invaded and plundered the native people, the most available
dog food was human flesh. Those dogs had been trained to kill human beings, and
there were already instances in Europe of feeding the enemy to the dogs of war.

Ironically, the other animals the Spaniards
took along for food were the dogs themselves. When the Spaniards found themselves
starving in uninhabited territory while looking for natives to plunder, the dogs
became the food of last resort. No historian has yet made this point (that I
am aware of), but as the Spaniards made many unsubstantiated accusations of native
cannibalism, they ate human-fed dogs.

As
those acts became known and were seized upon by Spain’s European rivals for propaganda
purposes, the term “Black Legend” came into being to dismiss such events
as mere propaganda. The events were used to score propaganda points, but
that did not make them less true. As David Stannard and others have made the
case, the Spanish genocidal temperament was far from unique. The English and
their political descendants, the Americans, had attitudes every bit as genocidal
as the Spanish. They just had fewer opportunities for slaughter.[33]

To
Spanish credit, there were some people who lamented the slaughter, the
priest Bartolomé Las Casas most prominent among them. He was the chief critic
and most prominent witness of the Spanish atrocities. Las Casas and people like
him were an extreme minority in Spain, although his and other Dominican efforts
affected Spanish royalty, which resulted in some laws of limited effect, such
as the Laws of Burgos in 1512 (which also spawned the insane, legalistic Requerimiento). Las Casas’ attitude hinted
at the Spanish attitude towards the natives: the Spanish generally saw them as
human beings (when not using them for dog food), although of an “inferior” race
and culture. At least on paper sometimes, the Spanish wanted to civilize the
natives and turn them into “good Christians,” whatever that may mean. The English,
on the other hand, generally felt the natives were subhuman. There is no record
of a native advocate among the English, one who remotely approached the effort
of Las Casas, who became known as the “Apostle of the Indians.”

Las
Casas is the primary chronicler of the Caribbean's devastation. He came to the
Caribbean in 1502 as a conqueror. He lived in Cuba with his own Indian slaves.
He was prosperous. He had a breakthrough of
conscience in 1514 that was a long time in coming, but when it did, he gave
away his Indians and dedicated the rest of his life to the natives’ welfare, becoming
their most outspoken advocate among the Europeans. He wrote a number of tracts
and books, and no account of what happened in the Caribbean is complete without
some of Las Casas’ descriptions of what he saw.

One
event that Las Casas witnessed is recorded in his A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,
the classic, polemic account of how the Spaniards treated the natives. A cacique
named Hatuey escaped the butchery on Española and fled to Cuba after the 1503
massacre at Xaraguá, taking his people with him. In 1511,
the Spaniards were looking for new lands to plunder after Española had been devastated,
and they invaded Cuba. Diego Velázquez, one of Ovando’s captains at the Xaraguá
massacre, led the first invasion of Cuba, partly because they knew Hatuey and
his people fled there. Velázquez became Cuba’s governor.

When
Hatuey heard the Spaniards were coming, he gathered his people, telling them that
the Spaniards had a god, and they would kill to get their hands on it. The Spanish
god was a basket of gold jewelry. Hatuey and his people honored the Spanish god
with a dance. Hatuey said that the only safety from the Spanish was not having
their god around, so they threw the jewelry into the nearest river.

That
strategy did not save them. After fleeing across Cuba, Hatuey was captured by
Velázquez and his men, while his people were slaughtered and enslaved. Las Casas
was a Dominican priest and witnessed a Franciscan brother doing his duty at Hatuey’s
execution. Hatuey was tied to a stake, to be burned alive in the Christian style.
The Franciscan tried converting Hatuey as he stood there, tied to the stake.
If Hatuey converted to Christianity, they would merely have executed him
with a sword, and the Franciscan would have “saved” one more soul. The priest
told him about heaven and hell, of eternal rest or damnation, depending on the
choice Hatuey took. Hatuey carefully considered the priest’s words. He asked
the priest if Christians went to heaven. When the priest said that the good ones
did, Hatuey replied that he would rather go to hell than be around those monstrous
Christians.[34] Then the flames
took him.

Multitudes
died in the horrific mine conditions. During the early 1500s, the Spaniards were
faced with a new problem: it was becoming difficult to find enough natives to
do the work. In 1496, when the tribute system was still in place, Columbus’ brother
Bartolomé, the acting governor while Columbus returned to Spain, apparently surveyed
the population to get an idea of how much tribute would pour in. The count tallied
1.1 million people. That was just counting the adults, in the region the Spaniards
controlled at that time, which came after two years of severe population decline
from violence, starvation, disease, etc.[35] In 1508, the count tallied 60,000
people. By 1535, the original inhabitants of La Isla Española were virtually
extinct, and were completely extinct a generation later. The Taino were
completely exterminated throughout the entire Caribbean long before the year 1600.

Today, there is a revival of the Taino people,
and there are stories and some evidence of some mixed-blood survival in mountainous
pockets in the Greater Antilles and survivors who fled to South America, but by
1600 the Taino were extinct for practical purposes in the Caribbean. Today’s
prevailing estimate is that they numbered somewhere between two to three million
in 1492, but they may have numbered more than ten million. It is history’s only
complete extermination of millions of people. There is nothing to compare
it to. Some of the Old Testament's Jewish battles
of extermination are quite bloody, but the complete extermination of millions
of people is unique. The 1,500 years of Taino inhabitation of the Caribbean
was plenty of time to have populated the islands with numbers in the millions,
and with the perfect climate, nearly zero violence, zero epidemic disease, superior
agriculture and other benefits that Europe did not remotely enjoy, to number less
than millions would be surprising.

The
pre-European-contact headcount on La Isla Española and the entire Western Hemisphere
is a matter of fierce academic controversy. The notion of the Western Hemisphere
as a primeval wilderness waiting to be tamed is a fantasy. With archeology coming
into its own during the past fifty years, today's evidence is that people have
been living in the Western Hemisphere possibly as long as they have in Europe.
North and South America comprise about sixteen million square miles, only slightly
less than Asia, which has more than seventeen million square miles. People have
been living in the New World for tens of thousands of years. The “primeval wilderness”
myths were partly self-serving lies invented by Europeans to make the New World's
rape look more benign. Americans are not alone with those delusions. South Africa
is another “settler-state” (where the Europeans invaded and stayed) that conjured
similar myths to soothe their national conscience. The pre-invasion head count
is consequently probably underestimated, perhaps severely so, in all “settler
states.”

The Western Hemisphere’s
natives were reverent towards nature, whereas Europeans were afraid of it, and
the European goal (so obvious even today in the Western mentality) was to conquer
and subjugate it.[36] Although the natives rarely raped the land as the Europeans did, it is
illogical to think they did not have many children, and increased their population.

There is plenty of evidence for a New World
population in 1492 of 100 million people. There is speculation it could have
been higher. Today, mainstream estimates of ninety million can be found, which
is naturally a piece of sophisticated guesswork.[37]
It is estimated that Europe had about 80 million people in 1500 AD, and Asia somewhere
around 300 million, with a margin of error of 10 to 25% because there was no census
anywhere in the world.[38] The surface area of the Western
Hemisphere is about four times that of Europe. One early, authoritative “scientific”
estimate, which is regrettably still influential today, by Alfred Kroeber of the
University of California at Berkeley in 1939, estimated slightly more than eight
million people for the entire Western Hemisphere in 1492. The British Isles alone
had nearly five million in 1492. Spain’s population was about eight million in
1492, or a population equivalent to (in Kroeber’s estimate) the entire Western
Hemisphere’s, which had land just as inhabitable or more, people living at about
the same level of technology, and often more so, for a preposterous population
density about fifty times greater than the New World’s. One reason for such a
low estimate was the now-discredited notion that the natives migrated to the New
World only a few thousand years ago, an estimate that was upheld for generations
by attacking any scientist who found evidence suggesting otherwise. A more likely
estimate now is 40,000 years, and nobody in academia is arguing for less than
13,000 years ago.[39]

To
Kroeber’s credit, he stated that his estimate was based on many guesses, and suggested
that detailed scientific work be undertaken. The challenge was accepted by scholars
who also taught at Berkeley, most notably Carl Sauer, Sherburne Cook and Woodrow
Borah. They used a multidisciplinary scientific methodology to arrive at better
estimates, first by doing intensive work on a selected area, for instance, and
extrapolating it. The numbers the “Berkeley School” generated were startling:
eight million for Española alone and twenty-five million for Central Mexico, leading
Borah to conclude the population of the Western Hemisphere was more than one hundred
million. Based on the higher estimates, the decline of the New World population
in the 16th century was by about seventy million people, perhaps more.[40] The main side effect of the Spanish gold rush that lasted for a hundred years
was the extermination of about 90% of the Western Hemisphere’s population.

The new estimates sparked intense scholarly
debate, which has been raging for many years now.[41]
There is no good reason for believing that the Western Hemisphere’s population
was orders of magnitude less dense than the other continents in 1492. There are
credible arguments for it being more densely populated than other parts of the
world: no epidemic disease, no mass warfare, superior agriculture[42],
and idyllic climates and environs for significant parts of the Hemisphere. All
early chroniclers of the New World's invasion
remarked on how thickly populated the lands were.

The
Caribbean natives lived in a state Columbus described as Edenic during his first
voyage. They did not need clothes, food grew the year-round with crops and environment
far superior to Europe's, the ocean was bountiful, epidemic disease was unknown
and many of them did not know what a weapon was. According to Las Casas and others,
no Spaniard ever witnessed two Tainos fighting each other. If Española only had
the population density of the hellhole that was England in 1500, with its poor
climate, rampant disease, starvation and violence, it would have had more than
a million people.

David Stannard, author
of the devastating American Holocaust, uses the high end estimates in his
book, but for good reason: he has authored the most sophisticated existing pre-contact
population estimate for the Hawaiian islands.[43]
Stannard makes the impressive and nearly unchallenged case that the Hawaiian islanders
may have numbered about a million people before Captain Cook “discovered” them.
That challenges the conventional wisdom that has put the population at a few hundred
thousand at most. Hawaii has less than one-quarter of Española’s land, with similar
climactic conditions.

Las Casas made
the estimate of three million people on Española prior to Columbus, as have other
scholars. This essay will use two million for argument’s sake (a million is widely
accepted by today’s scholarship[44]), something Stannard would call conservative.

The depopulation to 60,000 people by 1508 was
a 97% depopulation in fifteen years. That might seem an unparalleled holocaust,
but a 95% depopulation ratio is the standard for the world’s natives after contacting
the filthy, disease-ridden Europeans.[45] The major culprits were the disease
epidemics that swept through the natives like wildfire. Across the planet, the
cultures that had been isolated from the Asia/Europe/Africa pathogens had a disastrous
time when first exposed to them, whether they lived in Iceland, Australia, the
South Pacific, Hawaii, or the New World. The Spaniards obviously killed many
thousands of natives, and ended up working and starving thousands (millions?)
more to death (or the one-two-three whammy of starvation and overwork leading
to susceptibility to disease), but nobody is suggesting that the Spaniards killed
two million people on Española with their swords.

There
are numerous accounts of the psychological dislocation that the natives manifested.
Imposing one culture on top of another, with the expressed purpose of eliminating
it, as the Spanish priests did for centuries, takes a tremendous psychic toll.
The native responses varied from drunkenness to chronic depression to infanticide
to suicide to simply lying down and dying.[46]
Two side effects of those psychological dislocations were a collapsing birth rate
and high infant mortality rate. Even if disease, starvation, overwork and murder
did not eliminate the natives, the low numbers of
surviving infants may have done the job.[47]
The Spaniards noticed the collapsing infant survival rates, and at times attempted
to force the natives to have children.

“It
is said, by Las Casas among others, that what perplexed the Tainos of Española
most about the strange white people from the large ships was not their violence,
not even their greed, nor in fact their peculiar attitudes toward property, but
rather their coldness, their hardness, their lack of love.”[48]

The Bahamas, where Columbus first made landfall
in the Western Hemisphere,[49] was the home of
perhaps a half million happy people. They became extinct within a few years.[50]
Similar decimation happened to the entire Caribbean region.

As
the natives died by the millions, the slave stock had to be replenished, and the
Spaniards raided further and further away, which
eventually took them to the mainland. One more important source of slaves to
mine the gold and work the plantations was exploited: Africa. As the natives
became extinct, the Spaniards and Portuguese
began importing Africans to the Caribbean. The African slave trade is another
dark chapter in world history. The European-African-American slave trade killed
many millions of million people, perhaps reaching as high as 30 to 60 million
people.[51] For what it is worth, Columbus, who worked in
the African slave trade in Europe, and who helped initiate what became the encomienda
policy on Española, and was a primary architect of the Caribbean genocide, was
not directly responsible for bringing African slaves to the Caribbean.

In Columbus' log of his first voyage, the primary
accounts of the second voyage, or Columbus' and others' accounts of his other
voyages, the mentality of the conquerors was striking.[52]
Columbus specialized in kidnapping natives as interpreters as he explored the
coastlines in and around the Caribbean. Capturing women for his men to use as
sex slaves was typical behavior, when his men were candid enough to admit it (Columbus
was writing to the queen, after all). Getting rich quickly (and/or famous) was
the preoccupation of all of them.

The
accounts were disquieting when describing the native flora and fauna in one section,
as Cuneo did, then casually describing killing more than twenty natives with crossbows
and firearms from their ships, as a prelude to "trading" with them.[53]
Columbus made it a policy not to allow his men to leave the ships unchaperoned,
because they robbed and raped with abandon when left on their own.

The
Spaniards were quick to suspect their "hosts" were plotting against
them. Then they would then launch a "preemptive" strike against the
natives, slaughtering hundreds or thousands of them. What betrayed the fact
that there was likely no plot was that the Spaniards' preemptive strikes nearly
always caught the natives by surprise. The natives were shocked and totally unprepared
for the Spanish violence that was unleashed against them. Nearly 100% of the
time, there was no trap about to be sprung. As with Columbus' fanciful
interpretations of Taino gestures, the Spaniards concluded from native gestures
what they wanted to find, and justifying a surprise attack on their "hosts"
seemed a Spanish penchant.[54]

In
no instance that I have seen or heard of, did anybody in Spain ever question the
conquest’s propriety. It was a universally held concept that conquering the Western
Hemisphere was a God-given right. Not even sympathetic historians, such as Las
Casas and Cieza de León, questioned if conquering the natives was justified.
For Las Casas, who was a great admirer of Columbus, the conquest was bringing
the light of Christianity. Las Casas came the closest to asking that Spain bring its ships
home, but never quite went that far. For soldier-historian Cieza de León,
conquest was merely what he did for a living. Although Cieza de León lamented the awesome destruction that the Spanish
invasion inflicted on the native populations, the question of whether the Spaniards
should have even come across the Atlantic was never given consideration. It is
a revealing commentary that nobody ever asked if invading the New World was "right."
The only debate was whether it could have been done more gently. Such an assumption
can be seen throughout history’s imperial cultures, including the United States.

Much
has been made of Columbus over the centuries. Sailor-historians have worshipped
Columbus as one of history’s great navigators, and have engaged in senseless debates
regarding where Columbus first landed in the New World.[55]
Others have extolled his renaissance virtues. During the 19th-century, there
was an attempt to make Columbus a saint. There has also been plenty of vilification,
particularly lately.

If
it were not Columbus, it would have been another European. Columbus was little
better or worse than his contemporaries, as far as his regard for the human beings
he exterminated. The awesome bloodshed of the first century of conquest was a
standard “frontier” situation. The people who manned the voyages to the New World
during the years of discovery were not the best and brightest Europe had to
offer. Soldiers of fortune and “gentleman adventurers” would not make an enlightened
first contact with the natives, and the men of the cloth often made things worse.
Many of the New World's early “settlers” had clipped ears and noses, denoting
criminal status in Europe.

After the
mercenary elements of European society secured the frontier, then came the “settlers,”
also not from European society's premier ranks. Although they did not usually
inflict the bloodshed of the “frontier” warriors and conquistadors, they finished
wiping out the native people and their cultures as they made their homes on native
lands and fleshed out the system of exploitation. They became participants in
the system and found people below them in society’s hierarchy. Having natives
to exploit moved them up one notch.

What
happened on Española is a phenomenon seen many times during the research for this
site. The resources (natives and land) seemed so limitless and abundant that
few thought of the consequences of their depredations. While everybody was trying
to get rich by mining gold and turning the Caribbean into one big plantation,
the natives and local environments were devastated. Hardly anybody bothered to
extrapolate the trends to see where they would lead until it was too late. By
1517, the gold had been mined and the Españolan natives were about one percent
of their pre-contact population. Nearly the entire Caribbean had been depopulated
by then. The priests, led by Las Casas, campaigned to have African slaves brought
in to do the plantation work, as they had proven heartier than natives in the
mines, and there were few natives left.

By
1518, the priests’ campaign succeeded, and the official policy was to have African
slaves replace the native slaves. The few remaining natives were to be freed
and moved into villages to live somewhat as they had before Columbus arrived.
The plan might have worked to rescue the Caribbean natives from the brink of extinction,
but fate had another card to play. European diseases had already killed countless
natives, but 1518 saw the first recorded epidemic of smallpox in the New World.
It wiped out more than half of the remaining natives on Española, quickly driving
them to extinction. Thus ends the story of the happy people who greeted Columbus.

Around
1990, as I began to study these areas, I believed that the black-skinned people
of today's Caribbean were indigenous people, some kind of equatorial New World
natives. I had no idea that they were all originally from Africa. The
complete genocide of the original Caribbean inhabitants was never emphasized
in my schooling.

Columbus made four
voyages to the New World. He eventually suspected that those islands were not
off of Asia, but that he had discovered a new continent.[56]
He was shipwrecked on his fourth voyage, and the natives of Jamaica fed the surviving
crewmembers for a year, while Columbus' men had a mutiny and not only killed each
other, but natives. For all his adventures, Columbus died in bed in 1506, in
Spain, surrounded by his family, friends and his seven servants, a man made rich
from the New World’s plunder.

There
is more to Columbus' story than this essay tells. He spent one return voyage
to Spain in chains (not really as a prisoner, but in a display of self-pity).
He was the first to realize that native genocide would be
bad for Spain in the end, as dead slaves cannot do any work.

What
this essay presents is not controversial to those who have studied Columbus.
Today, most Americans have some passing acquaintance with the real story. That
Columbus initiated the genocide of the natives is not really debated, even by
his admirers. Washington Irving published a mammoth
and hugely popular biography of Columbus in 1828, where he invented, among other
myths, the story of Columbus proving that the world was not flat. There is something
significant about a novelist writing the first major American work on Columbus.

With most good propaganda, most frequent are
the lies of omission, not commission. Nevertheless, some historians deride the
work of Sale and Stannard as “ideological.” Las Casas entered the political arena
and Sauer taught at Berkeley. Some scholars make the case that the New World
was not as pristine as “revisionist” scholars would have people believe.[57]
The point made throughout this site’s essays is that we know little for sure.

With all the uncertainty, there is some
warranted confidence regarding what may have happened. People lived in the Western
Hemisphere in large numbers. They altered the landscape somewhat, and could destroy
their environment to where it no longer sustained them, as how the Mayans had
a population collapse that ended their "classic" phase a thousand years
ago. Yet, compared to what the Europeans did to their land, the Western Hemisphere
generally was pristine. We can never come close to knowing what it was
really like before Columbus showed up, partly because the Europeans actively destroyed
the culture they invaded.

Why
does America celebrate Columbus Day? Modern scholarship does not take the heroic
image of Columbus seriously, and yet the "revisionists" are taken to
task for their critiques of Columbus’ image and other popular myths.

America’s
capital is named after Columbus (he jointly holds that honor with another American
hero, George Washington), and America was nearly named
after him. Cities, streets, a river and other places are named for him. According
to an official at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, Columbus’ likeness
was second place to Jesus in how often it had been produced.[58]

Americans celebrate the “discovery”
of the Western Hemisphere because our ancestors erected European-style civilizations
on the bones and ashes of its dead inhabitants. The Columbus Day celebrations
are the dysfunctional rituals of a conqueror society. It is true that there were
dark sides to native cultures. They apparently practiced human sacrifice in some
of the New World cultures, sometimes. Warfare was not unknown. The people of
the New World were human, but in the areas of viciousness and avarice, on a scale
of ten the Western Hemisphere's natives probably ranked a two or three, and the
Europeans a nine. America celebrates Columbus Day because Columbus was a "winner."

During
the past several centuries, the apologists for Europe’s conquest of the New World
have gladly told graphic tales of human sacrifice, cannibalism, torture of captives
and other native atrocities. The record is nearly devoid of a European witness
to those acts.

Howard Zinn summed up the position America and its scholarship
has taken towards Columbus. He wrote about the brainwashing American students
receive, how they rarely learn differently, and how scholars have abetted the
situation. Zinn wrote:

"Past
the elementary and high schools, there are only occasional hints of something
else. Samuel Elliott Morison, the Harvard historian, was the most distinguished
writer on Columbus, the author of a multi-volume biography, and was himself a
sailor who retraced Columbus’ route across the Atlantic. In his popular book
Christopher Columbus, Mariner, written in 1954, he tells about the enslavement
and the killing: 'The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and his successors resulted
in complete genocide.'

"That is
on one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grand romance. In the book’s
last paragraph, Morison sums up his view of Columbus: ‘He had his faults and his
defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great
- his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and his own mission as the Christ-bearer
to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and
discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and
essential of all his qualities - his seamanship.’

"One
can outright lie about the past. Or one can omit facts that might lead to unacceptable
conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does
not omit the story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word
one can use: genocide.

"But he does
something else - he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more
important to him. Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery
which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state
the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to
say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place,
but it’s not important - it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it
should affect very little what we do in the world.

"…To
emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators, and to de-emphasize
their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves
- unwittingly - to justify what was done.

"My
point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus
in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise
in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary
price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization;
Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)
- that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that
we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are
buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same
proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most
respected classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming
from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when
it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.

"The
treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks) - the quiet acceptance
of conquest and murder in the name of progress - is only one aspect of a certain
approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments,
conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal
acceptance, as if they, - the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt,
Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court
- represent the nation as a whole.

"…'History
is a memory of states,’ wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored,
in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the
viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered
from those statesmen’s policies. From his standpoint, the ‘peace’ that Europe
had before the French Revolution was ‘restored’ by the diplomacy of a few national
leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people
in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except the upper classes, it
was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation - a world not restored
but disintegrated."[59].

Zinn's A People's History of the United
States is filled with insightful nuggets. His book should be read in American
classrooms instead of the paeans to Columbus.

What
has happened during the past generation, with Columbus’ heroic image being tarnished,
is not new facts arising, but looking at the facts objectively. The picture that
then emerged can rightly be called horrifying. Indeed, what have our ancestors
been cheering about? Yet, we still have a national holiday called Columbus Day.

We cannot all get on boats
and sail back to Europe. The acts of our ancestors are not pretty, and if we
had been born then, we might have done the same. The past is the past, and we
can do nothing about it except learn from it, and perhaps try healing some of
the damage that our ancestors inflicted, such as treating the remnants of the
native tribes a lot better, even giving back some of the land that our ancestors
murderously stole from theirs. Celebrating what our ancestors did and lying about
the past seem the most inappropriate responses, and probably underlie
a mass psychosis.

Along
with Zinn, there have been other efforts to counter the Columbus Myth propaganda.
Hans Koning's Columbus, His Enterprise, was published in 1976, which was
Zinn's first inkling that the story that Zinn, a Ph.D. in history, had been taught
about Columbus might be a little awry. My college history textbook also did
nothing to try challenging the Columbus Myth. In the 1991 edition of Columbus,
His Enterprise, the final chapter is titled "Columbus in the Classroom,"
written by Bill Bigelow. Bigelow described that presentation
he makes to his classes every year, and then led them down the inexorable
path of understanding that the European "discovery" of the New World
was really invasion, murder and theft from the people who had been living here
for millennia.

Bigelow uses Columbus,
His Enterprise as a textbook for his class, and the students then studied
history textbooks and critiqued their highly slanted presentations of the New
World's "discovery." The people being discovered may as well have not
existed as far as the textbooks went. The focus was all on the Spaniards and
their awe of the new land, taking possession of it in the name of the King and
Queen, the glory, etc. Who likes to hear they have been lied to their entire
lives? At least regarding the Columbus Myth, those students began getting their
brains unwashed, which helped them cast a critical eye at other myths they had
been told. If only every American history class did the same.

Zinn
was a professionally trained historian, ironically earning his doctorate at Columbia,
and he openly admits that he did not realize what a whitewash the Columbus story
was until he began researching A People's History of the United States.
Professional American historians have gone their entire lives and never
learned about the dark side of Columbus' legacy. One student said:

"It
seemed to me as if the publishers had just printed up some "glory story"
that was supposed to make us feel more patriotic about our country. In our group,
we talked about the possibility of the government trying to protect young students
from such violence. We soon decided that was probably one of the farthest things
from their minds. They want us to look at our country as great, and powerful,
and forever right. They want us to believe Columbus was a real hero. We're being
fed lies. We don't question the facts, we just absorb information that is handed
to us because we trust the role models that are handing it out."[60]

In
2006, I heard from a college professor who has used this essay in his class curriculum
for several years. He told me that the information on Columbus in this essay
is a shock to about 99% of his pupils. As James Loewen remarked in his seminal
Lies my Teacher Told Me, the real hero
in American history textbooks is America itself. The story is of the state as
hero, always right, forever unstained, marching off to greater feats of glory
and righteousness. That is the Big Lie of American "history." That
mentality is needed, however, in order to get boys to march off to distant wars, to defend our great nation
from "threats" such as Iraq and
Vietnam.

America’s
entertainment industry has a long-standing tradition of depicting invading armies
from other planets, from the 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds to
the 1996 movie Independence Day. The themes of those works of art tap
deep into our national psyches and memories. In those stories, we are the natives.
Unlike War of the Worlds, where invisible disease vanquished the invaders,
or Independence Day, where a small group of unlikely heroes pulled off
an unlikely upset, the Tainos (and most natives of the Western Hemisphere) were
not so fortunate. Imagine the Martian invasion was successful. Humanity quickly
became a dying species as the invaders “cleared” the land for settlement, while
importing their people, culture, crops, animals and technology. Maybe humanity
was not totally exterminated, but small surviving groups were allowed to exist
on land the invaders deemed useless, where they barely eked out an existence.
Then imagine the anniversary of the invasion’s first day became a great day of
celebration for the conquering extra-terrestrials, their invading fleet’s captain
a hero, with their rhetoric stating they had displaced an inferior species, beings
who were not properly taking advantage of what their planet offered. How advanced
would such a conquering culture be?

Or
turn the story of Columbus around a little. Imagine that Native Americans discovered
the British Isles in 1492. They were searching for flint, because they used it
as currency. Because they had a military prowess that nobody could resist, they
quickly enslaved the British Isles’ natives, and in a couple of generations had
exterminated the Isles’ entire population, while the natives were forced to mine
flint. It was also a mere prelude to invading Europe and killing off about 95%
its inhabitants. The Indians, after they had secured Europe, wrote histories
that extolled the virtues of their race and European culture was nearly wiped
off the map. The English and Celtic languages became as extinct as their culture
and people, and the Indians could not have cared less, and never even mentioned
or cared about the people they exterminated. Would the Indians therefore be a
"great people"? Or, might some legitimately lament the passing of a
people and culture that might have contributed much to humankind? Imagine a world
with no Shakespearean writings. Would that be something to celebrate, or something
to lament? Some might think it would be have been great, given the course of
world history. Not me. Everybody can have something worthwhile to offer.
Perhaps the gentle Taino could have taught the world profound lessons about loving
one's neighbor, which they may have done better than any other culture. We will
never know. It is one of history's ironies that Christians completely exterminated
them.

Will Americans
ever stop celebrating (or overlooking) the murderous acts of our ancestors? That
is something only we can answer. Progress has been made. Columbus Day is not
the frenzied celebration it was a hundred years ago, or even forty. The day we
unmake that national holiday and replace it with one for native remembrance, for
instance, (and maybe give some land back) will be an important one for our progress
as a people. Maybe then we will be on our way to becoming “great.”

[4] The side trip the Pinta took was eventually the subject
of litigation. The Pinzón family helped finance the voyage and captained the
Niña and Pinta. Carl Sauer believed the evidence weighed in favor of a mix-up
leading to the separation of the Pinta, and Martín Pinzón was not taking a disloyal
side-trip to fill his pockets. See Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, pp.
27-29.

[5] I write, "murdered," because the last the
Spaniards saw of them they fled into the jungle with wounds that were probably
mortal. The incident was almost certainly one where the Spaniards interpreted
harmless native gestures incorrectly and attacked their hosts. The "shoot
first and ask questions later" (if ever) mentality would characterize European
attitudes toward New World natives for the next few centuries. See Sale, The
Conquest of Paradise, pp. 120-121. See also Fernando Colón’s The Life
of the Admiral Christopher Columbus, pp. 88-90. Colón’s account is typical
in how it projected hostile motivation onto what were likely innocent native activities.
It strains credibility to think that Columbus, just as he was heading back to
Spain, received his first hostile response, especially if one reads the accounts
of it. After buying some bows and arrows from the natives, Columbus’ men tried
buying more, as Columbus instructed them to. After selling them some bows and
arrows, the natives (they were not the Taino, but the nearby Ciguayo) brought
forward some rope to trade, which Columbus’ men interpreted to mean they were
going to try to tie them up. Columbus’ men then ferociously attacked the natives,
severely wounding two, who likely died. The natives fled at the attack by Columbus’
men. The landing boat’s pilot helped restrain the attacking Spaniards, and prevented
it from becoming the first wholesale slaughter of the Columbian era. Columbus
heartily approved of the attack. He thought them Caribs (they were not), and
thought that when word got around that a few Spaniards could chase off more than
fifty Caribs, they would fear the Spaniards and leave the men left behind at the
fort alone. It appeared that Columbus and his men were looking for a reason to
make an example out of some natives, and found the opportunity just as they were
“leaving town.”

[7] Taino is a name given to the Arawakan people of the
Greater Antilles, related to their mainland cousins in South America, from where
they originally emigrated. “Taino” is the name of convention today, and what
they called themselves, so I use it on this site. Columbus called them “Indios,”
and believed them to be people of Asia.

[8] See Sale, The Conquest of Paradise. p. 189.
The Book of Prophecies was not really a book, but a collection of writings
that Columbus planned to present to the Spanish sovereigns. It was largely composed
of excerpts from the Bible and other Christian writings. The general theme was
Christian evangelism and the “liberation” of Jerusalem. Columbus was trying to
draw parallels from scripture to his discoveries across the Atlantic Ocean. To
be fair to Columbus, the issue of geography and the Bible was significant then.
Bible scholars before Columbus’ voyages asserted that there could be no other
lands than what were described in the Bible, and the Isabella-instigated Spanish Inquisition, with its
flaming stakes and hot tongs, enforced the Bible’s certitude. Columbus, in part,
was trying to justify his enterprise with the Bible, draw a line through his discoveries,
convert the entire world to Christianity, and mount another Crusade to Jerusalem,
and prepare for the coming battle with the Antichrist. It partly reflected the
times he lived in, as well as his ambition and fanaticism. As Sale wrote, there
is little of the Renaissance’s influence evident in that work. See the scholarly
edition of The Book of Prophecies by Roberto Rusconi, translated by Blair
Sullivan, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997.

[9] See Lyle McAlister, Spain and Portugal in the
New World, 1492-1700. p. 63.

[10] See Columbus' memorial to the sovereigns of April
1493 in Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages
of Christopher Columbus, pp. 199-202.

[15]On Guadeloupe, Columbus may have rescued Taino women the Caribs
had "bride captured,” and returned them home (although Cuneo wrote that they
were sent to Spain as a "sample"). It may have been one of Columbus'
"noble" acts. Unfortunately, the fate of those women would have been
better if he had left them there, and the "rescued" women acted just
as the other natives Columbus had captured, jumping overboard to escape when the
ship was anchored off Española (see Chanca's letter in Christopher Columbus,
The Four Voyages, J.M. Cohen, translator, p. 151).

[16] Cuneo, in Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents
on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, p. 212. Kirkpatrick Sale
writes of the encounter, “One longs to know the young woman's version [of events
– Ed.].”

[17] See Fernando Colón’s The Life of the Admiral Christopher
Columbus, Benjamin Keen, translator, pp. 117-121. See also Chanca's letter
in Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages, J.M. Cohen, translator, pp.
144-152).

[18] See discussion of the controversy of just what disease
it was in Stannard, American Holocaust, pp. 68-69. Stannard believes swine
flu to be the likeliest candidate, with good reason.

[19] See Bitterli’s Cultures in Conflict, p. 22.
See Sauer’s Sixteenth Century North America, p. 301.

[20] See Fernando Colón, The Life of the Admiral Christopher
Columbus, Benjamin Keen, translator, p. 144.

[21] See Fernando Colón, The Life of the Admiral Christopher
Columbus, Benjamin Keen, translator, pp. 240-241. See also Koning, Columbus:
His Enterprise, pp. 108-109.

[25] Columbus began calling himself the Christ-bearer
immediately after the first voyage, but the tally for Columbus' reign was: native
deaths = millions; native conversions = zero. See Sale, The Conquest of Paradise,
p. 127. See Morison’s Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages
of Christopher Columbus, p. 202.

[26] Written during his fourth and final voyage to the
New World, in a letter to the King and Queen. McAlister, Lyle. Spain and
Portugal in the New World, 1492-1700, p. 81. A different translation is in
Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher
Columbus, p. 383, which states, "O, most excellent gold! Who has gold
has a treasure with which he gets what he wants, imposes his will on the world,
and even helps souls to paradise."

[27] It was perhaps not so warped. The Tainos regarded
hanging as the worst way to die. See Barreiro, "A Note on the Tainos,"
Confronting Columbus, p. 41.

[28] See Stannard, American Holocaust, pp. 71-72,
83-84. See Las Casas, The Destruction of the Indies, pp. 74, 125. See
Todorov, The Conquest of America, pp. 138-139. One phenomenon deserves
mention here. Events on the New World's frontier were sparsely documented. When
an atrocity such as feeding a live infant to a dog was witnessed and recorded
by concerned priests, or a historian wrote of seeing Indian parts hanging from
a porch, being used for dog food, it is guaranteed those practices happened far
more than were documented.

[29]On the Caribbean colonization, the following are some sources
I used and liked, where readers can find out more. Fuson, The Log of Christopher
Columbus; Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages
of Christopher Columbus; Benjamin Keen, translator, Fernando Colón, The
Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus; J. M. Cohen, translator, Christopher
Columbus, The Four Voyages; Koning, Columbus: His Enterprise; Todorov,
The Conquest of America; Sale, The Conquest of Paradise; Sauer,
The Early Spanish Main; Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction
of the Indies; McAlister, Spain & Portugal in the New World, 1492-1700;
Jacobs, The Tainos, The People who Welcomed Columbus; Rouse, The Tainos,
Rise and Decline of the People who Greeted Columbus; Stannard, American
Holocaust, chapter 3 in particular; Bitterli: Cultures in Conflict,
chapter 3 in particular; Zinn, A People's History of the United States, chapter
1; Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, chapter 2; Yewell, Dodge, DeSirey eds.,
Confronting Columbus.

[30] Pedro de Cieza de León, The Incas. Translated
by Harriet de Onis. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959. p. lix.

[31] Las Casas remarked on herds of natives being used
for dog food, and that the more “compassionate” Spaniards would first kill the
natives before feeding them to the dogs. The less genteel ones would just set
the dogs on their live food. For a contemporary reproduction of one of those
butcher shops, see Varner and Varner, The Dogs of Conquest, pp. 30-31,
which is from a version of Las Casas’ Destruction of the Indies.

[32] These “dogging” practices are documented in Varner
and Varner, The Dogs of Conquest.

[34] This story is recounted in Las Casas, A Short
Account of the Destruction of the Indies, pp. 27-29. See also Barreiro, "A
Note on the Tainos," Confronting Columbus, p. 42.

[35] A number of modern scholars dismiss virtually all
estimates made by the Spanish at that time. The rationale is that soldiers, “adventurers”
and priests (virtually the only European visitors to the New World for many years)
wildly inflated the numbers to make their conquests or potential conversions seem
grander, or Las Casas inflated his numbers to make the horror greater. When Cortés
estimated the number of warriors he faced in battle, he was almost undoubtedly
engaging in that medieval practice, but the count of natives on Española in 1496
was influenced by neither soldierly nor priestly "heroism." It was
a bureaucratic attempt to determine the future flows of gold from the tribute
system. To disregard the number of 1,130,000 adult natives apparently counted
on the controlled part of the island is questionable scholarship. The count may
not have been the most accurate of all time, but it is the only count performed
back then, and modern scholarship and scientific investigation has determined
that number is by no means unreasonable, and neither is such a large population’s
collapse. It may be unreasonable to those trying to minimize the devastation
the European invasion inflicted on the New World natives, and those who prefer
the myth of an untamed wilderness awaiting the conquering heroes from Europe.
See discussion by Carl Sauer in The Early Spanish Main, pp. 65-67, 200-204.
The Spaniards could certainly count. They were great at counting up how many
pesos of gold they plundered from the New World. Columbus used a method of navigation
on his first voyage known as dead reckoning. Dead reckoning is sailing without
any landmarks, and estimating how many miles you traveled by simply watching the
water go by. Robert Fuson, one of the sailor-historian types, stated that Columbus
might have been the “greatest dead-reckoning sailor who ever lived.” (Fuson, The
Log of Christopher Columbus, page 29, and his sentiment is held by many others.)
Only fifteen years after “discovery,” the Spanish were taking accurate head counts
of the remaining natives. Angel Rosenblat, the leading minimalist scholar on
the pre-contact population of the New World, believes the count of one million
was more of Columbus’ hyperbole. See his argument in Denevan’s The Native
Population of the Americas in 1492, pp. 43-66.

[36] Kirkpatrick Sale covers the topic in The Conquest
of Paradise, with a good literature review. For instance, William Leiss'
The Domination of Nature and Keith Thomas' Man and the Natural World
are two excellent reviews of the European attitude toward the natural world and
how they developed it.

[37]Encarta
Encyclopedia, 2001 edition, estimates ninety million. Denevan’s The Native
Population of the Americas in 1492, p xxviii, weighs in at fifty-four million,
from its 1992 edition. This site uses an eighty million estimate.

[39]It is one more area of intense debate. See Adams, Prehistoric
Mesoamerica, pp. 20-2; Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, pp. 35-52; Stannard,
American Holocaust, pp. 261-266; Churchill, Since Predator Came,
pp. 265-296; Mann, 1491, pp. 137-173. Charles Ginenthal summarizes the
political situation regarding the supposed migration date in his The Extinction
of the Mammoth, pp. 13-36. For a generation Ales Hrdlicka, who in 1903 became
the first curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s department of physical anthropology,
attacked anybody who questioned his pet theory that mankind did not migrate to
the New World earlier than a few thousand years ago. Even Louis Leakey drew Hrdlicka’s
ire. Scientists’ careers were ruined when they proposed that mankind was here
before Hrdlicka’s magic date. Scientists even suppressed their own data when
it suggested an earlier migration date than dogma dictated, in order to preserve
their careers. Such inquisitorial behavior set back the science considerably,
and such dogmatism persists in the field today. The dark journey of Dr. Virginia
Steen-McIntyre will serve as an example of that phenomenon. In the 1960s, a major
archeological find was discovered in Hueyatlaco, Mexico, where sophisticated stone
tools were unearthed. Three geologists working for the U.S. Geological survey
were given the task of dating the finds. Steen-McIntyre was one of them. They
used four independent methods of dating the find, including the radioactive decay
of uranium. Their results were startling: an age of 250,000 years. If valid,
such evidence would jeopardize entire bodies of evolutionary and anthropological
theory. The scientific establishment acted predictably: it suppressed the findings'
publication. Worse than that, in the words of Steen-McIntyre, the establishment's
efforts “killed my career.” She lost her university teaching position and was
blackballed from the profession. In a letter written in June of 1995, Steen-McIntyre
wrote “…the only work I can get now is as a flower gardener in a local nursing
home!” See Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archeology and Cremo, Forbidden
Archeology’s Impact for documentation of Steen-McIntyre’s tale. See also
Mary Owen Webb and Susan Clark’s (from Texas Tech University) “Anatomy of an Anomaly,”
in Disputatio 6, May 1999. Today, it is on the Internet. Unfortunately, hers is far from
the only modern account of that type of treatment
of anomalous evidence. Anthropologist Thomas Lee excavated stone implements in
glacial till in Canada in the 1950s that were dated to more than 65,000 years
old, also challenging the prevailing dogma. The establishment treated Lee similarly,
also documented in Forbidden Archeology. George Carter, Louis Leakey and
others have had their anomalous findings received similarly. Wipe out all the
disquieting evidence, and the theories can survive.

[41] The classic summary of the situation today is found
in William Denevan’s The Native Population of the Americas in 1492. Denevan
took the average of the scholars in the various New World regions that they studied,
and arrived at an estimate of the 1492 population of 54 million people in the
1992 edition of the book, with a likely range from 43 to 65 million. With all
the work that has been done, they are no more than sophisticated guesses, as they
always will be. In contrast to Hugh Thomas’ assertion that the maximalists have
clouded the issue and largely prevailed, in the United States the minimalists
prevailed for a long time. Denevan admits that 100 million is reasonable. The
crux of the matter is how devastating the first instances of European-introduced
disease were. The numerous studies favor a particularly high mortality rate,
with entire regions being quickly depopulated.

[42] New World natives developed more than half of the
world’s crops grown today, such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, tomatoes, cassava,
many varieties of beans, and peanuts. The introduction of New World crops is
largely credited with the tremendously expanding
world population during the past few centuries. See Weatherford, Indian
Givers, pp. 59-115. See Rouse, The Tainos, p. 170.

[43] See Stannard, Before the Horror. See also
O. A. Bushnell, The Gifts of Civilization, Germs and Genocide in Hawai'i.

[44] For instance, Denevan uses the estimate of one million
for Española in the 1992 edition of The Native Population of the Americas in
1492, down from the two million estimated in the 1976 edition. The several
million estimated for Española is still respected in many scholarly quarters.

[45] See Stannard, Before the Horror, pp.46-47
for a review of twenty examples of comparative depopulations due to Western contact,
in Iceland, Australia, Guatemala, etc. See Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel.

[46] See Jackson and Castillo, Indians, Franciscans,
and Spanish Colonization. pp. 51-53, 85. See Stannard, American Holocaust,
p. 74. See Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, p. 7, 150, 409.
See Fogel, Junípero Serra, the Vatican, and Enslavement Theology, pp. 114-164.
See Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, pp. 350-351. The same phenomenon
happened to the Hawaiians after they were "discovered" in 1778. There
was one hallucinogenic plant in Hawaii, which only the chiefs enjoyed. Alcohol
caught on as the natives underwent the profound psychological dislocations of
being introduced to the white man's "civilization," and the natives
drank with abandon as they succumbed to the genocide that the white culture and
germs inflicted on them. See O. A. Bushnell, The Gifts of Civilization, Germs
and Genocide in Hawai'i, especially pp. 193-194.

[47] See census results of children in the collapsing
population of Española in Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, pp. 200-204.
See Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, pp. 350-351. See Todorov, The
Conquest of America, p. 134.

[49] On one Bahaman island, we do not know which. The
sailor-historians have been wrestling about which one it was for hundreds of years.
I suppose the debate is so they can put the monument to Columbus on the correct
island.

[51]See Stannard, American Holocaust, pp.
317-318, n. 9 for a good discussion, referencing numerous research papers, on
the issue of the African slave trade's death toll. Of course, there are lower
estimates, such as Basil Davidson’s estimate of nine million deaths between 1650-1850
in his The African Slave Trade. Stannard's Before the Horror was
a groundbreaking study of the pre-discovery Hawaiian population. A popular scholar
whose estimates of the Caribbean pre-Columbian population are among the lowest
existing is Sir Hugh Thomas. Thomas recently wrote The Slave Trade. He
also wrote a recent popular and critically acclaimed account of those early days
of Spanish conquest, Conquest, which deals with the Aztec conquest. Although
scholarly and mammoth, some of Thomas’ biases, as with much of mainstream history
writing, were evident. On the subject of Mexico’s pre-contact population, Thomas
writes at length, devoting an appendix to the issue. He semi-humorously portrayed
the debate regarding the pre-contact population levels as a battle between the
“maximalists” and the “minimalists.” He concluded his survey by stating that
nobody really knows what the numbers were, but when he has made an estimate of
the pre-Columbian Caribbean population, he is a staunch minimalist. On p. 67
he states that the pre-contact population on “Hispaniola…may have been over 100,000.”
That is the lowest existing estimate, and such an estimate neglects (among other
things) Bartolomé Colón’s (Columbus’ brother) apparent 1496 estimate of 1.1 million
adults on only part of the island, for tribute calculation purposes. What is
difficult to reconcile with Thomas’ minimalist estimate is the fact that after
fifteen years of wanton slaughter, disease, starvation, mass suicide, and being
worked to death in the mines and plantations, the Spanish royal treasurer took
a careful count in 1508 and counted about 60,000 natives (and perhaps only counted
the natives of working age. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, p. 65-67, 155-156,
200-204). The trajectory after that count was a swift slide to extinction: less
than 30,000 by 1514 (after the entire Caribbean had been scoured for natives to
work on Española), less than 20,000 by 1518, and virtual extinction by 1535 (200
counted in 1542, Las Casas, in Sale, p.161. See also Las Casas The Destruction
of the Indies, p. 26 and 27, where he remarked that Puerto Rico, Jamaica and
Cuba were similarly depopulated), and total extinction well before the end of
the century. Thomas sides with the scholar Angel Rosenblat and his estimates
of more than sixty years ago, estimates considered the ultra-conservative extreme
by modern scholars. See Denevan The Native Population of the Americas in 1492,
pp. xvii - xxix. Even Columbus remarked that more than 80% of the native population
alive in 1500 died by 1504 (see Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, p. 155).
Regarding the pre-Columbian population of Cuba, the estimates run from 600,000
to the preposterously low 16,000. A number of 16,000 is less than half a person
per square mile. Tibet, with one of the planet's most inhospitable climates,
is ten times more densely populated than that. On page 1512 of Cuba, The Pursuit
of Freedom (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), Thomas states, “The lowest estimate
and the one to which I incline is 16,000.” Thomas is the minimalist’s minimalist.
On page 65 of Conquest Thomas wrote that Columbus’ men “seduced” the native
women. Cuneo’s prey probably would not have called herself “seduced.”
Thomas seemed to consistently side with the Spanish accounts of events, such as
the death of Montezuma and the myth of Aztec cannibalism. All that stated, I
read Conquest, though warily, and found it a useful source of history on
the Aztec conquest. In Thomas' The Slave Trade I find no quantification
of the African death toll due to the slave trade. He put a number on how many
slaves made it to the New World in his appendices, but not how many died in the
process. For a scholar who is lauded, even knighted, for his scholarship, and
whose work is held up for how balanced it is, it consistently minimized or overlooked
native suffering due to Europe's devastation of Africa and the New World.

[52] Several are presented in Morison, Journals and
other Documents in the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. See also
Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages, translated by J.M. Cohen.

[53] See Cuneo's account in Morison, ed., Journals
and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, especially
p. 222.

[54] The Xaraguá massacre was one of many. On the
way to Tenochtitlán, the Spanish mercenaries were constantly looking for plotters
against them. Cortés accused the city of Cholula, a religious center, of plotting
against him, and virtually destroyed the town while slaughtering several thousand
people. The Spaniards never saw any opposition to their approach, were welcomed
by Montezuma, who they quickly kidnapped and held for ransom. While
Cortés was away defeating the army the Cuban governor
had sent against him, his men slaughtered thousands of Aztec citizens at their
spring festival, once again invoking the “plot” against them. While the evidence
for a Cholula plot was extremely weak, there was absolutely no evidence that the
residents of Tenochtitlán were plotting against the Spaniards. After the slaughter,
however, the populace laid siege to the imperial palace, and the Spaniards were
caught sneaking out of town and the resultant battle during their flight is today
called “The Night of Sorrows” by Spanish chroniclers. Thomas’
Conquest ably covers those events.

[55] See Fuson, The Log of Christopher Columbus,
pp. 201-202 for a listing of several dozen guesses over the past four centuries
where Columbus first landed. Fuson himself weighs in with his theory that it
was Samana Cay.

[56] See Las Casas' abstract of Columbus' third voyage
in Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher
Columbus, especially pp. 278-280.

[57] For one example of a summary of the “revisionism”
by a mainstream historian, where his opinions are of the establishment variety,
see Axtell, James. "Columbian Encounters: 1992-95." The William and
Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, Vol. LII, No. 4, October 1995. Ward Churchill
takes Axtell’s scholarship to task in his A Little Matter of Genocide.